There’s a fascinating and kind of hilarious item in Axios today. The headline is: Trump’s immigration erosion worries his team. Reading the piece, it all appears to be a reaction to the fairly obvious point that the highly visible and increasingly brutal ICE raids are not popular. And the American public is beginning to see these “surges” into Blue cities, rightly, not as aggressive immigration enforcement but as something more like punitive expeditions into what Trump views as enemy cities or something like occupied territory.
What I’ve noticed is how top administration leaders and especially the ICE agents on the ground are increasingly leaning into the visions of these “surges” and raids as a kind of cleansing violence, even much more than they were in the early period of this effort back in the summer. They increasingly look less like efforts to rack up deportation numbers ( that may be happening in a more piecemeal fashion across the country ) and more like hyper-violent expeditions targeting all the people who — in the MAGA vision — are getting in the way of Making America Great Again.
We had this discussion a few days ago about whether the hyper-aggressive and positive response to Renee Good’s shooting might be, surprisingly and distressingly, good politics. This Axios piece, and the various administration officials interviewed in it, would suggest that if we see good politics as more people supporting you than thinking you suck the pretty resounding answer right now is, no. Sizable majorities of Americans really don’t like any of this. ICE’s reputation is cratering. People think ICE makes American cities less safe.
The comments from administration officials are predictably passive aggressive and aggrieved. But push through that and the gist of the piece is that there is at least a faction in the White House that wants to back off the aggressive and hyper-violent tactics because it’s bumming people out and putting the White House (and Republicans) in a worse position for the midterms. The general line is that it’s all awesome, but it doesn’t necessarily look good. And maybe they can try to make it look a bit better so people who are going to vote in the midterms won’t be so upset. They suggest at least that Trump himself knows some of this stuff looks pretty bad, or at least looks bad to people whose support they need. As I said, the tone is passive aggressive and aggrieved, willfully ignoring the fact that the punitive hyper-violence is a feature not a bug.
But there’s an important point we can draw from this.
The mission of cleansing violence is something the MAGA base loves. It’s a kinetic performance of the heart points of the MAGA movement: aggressive and violent retribution against domestic enemies — the whiny women, the lesbians and the gays, the international riffraff polluting the nation’s blood, the armies of complainers the elites call “protesters.” They can’t really cut that loose because that’s the core of their movement; it’s what drives their most devoted and motivated followers. But to a majority of the population this spectacle is surprising and upsetting, and increasingly frightening. It’s a reminder that “good politics” isn’t always a simple thing. Sometimes you have to do necessary politics (sticking with your core supporters) before you can get to good politics. And hyper-aggressive people often think they can manifest the political reality they want into being even when they can’t. It’s a sign that this vision of national cleansing through violence remains very much the wish of a minority of the population, really probably a pretty small minority. And if you think adamantly defending the unloading of a firearm into a harmless woman might not play well with most people … it really may be that simple: people don’t like it.
